Upgrade Your Holiday

Right now my days consist mostly of working on my Mozart role and waiting around for my Brazil trip to happen (I'm leaving June 15, FYI), so it's not like I have a whole lot going on. I had no plans at all for the holiday weekend because everyday is pretty much a holiday for me anyways since I'm not working. However, I have really awesome friends who are always doing really fun stuff, so even when I have no plans I usually end up going out and doing something fun anyways.

Take this weekend for instance. On Saturday I went to a baptism in our ward (for Jen Ciccone, very cool girl) and when it was over my friend Dave asked me if I wanted to go with him on a Zingerman's Tour de Food. Zingerman's is a foodie's paradise here in Ann Arbor with five locations scattered around the city - the deli, the creamery, the bakehouse, the roadhouse diner, and the mail-order center (where Dave works). The Tour de Food is a challenge to visit all five locations in one day (they give you a passport which they sign at every stop). Along the way they give you tons of samples and at the end they give you a free t-shirt.

I had already been on a Tour de Food, but I decided to go anyways and it still fun the second time around with my friends Dave, Dan, Vaugh, and Carrie. The highlight for me was at the roadhouse, where I had my very first raw oyster. I was extremely hesitant for two reasons: a) raw - doesn't raw food make you sick/die? - and b) ewww, slimy! But it turns out that I didn't die (yet) and I actually thought that it was pretty good. Maybe those foodies are on to something.

The t-shirt I got at the end of the tour is pictured to the left. It's a play on the ubiquitous maize and blue Michigan shirts you see everywhere around Ann Arbor - I think there must be a Michigan school policy that at least 30% of the student body must be dressed in a maize and blue shirt at all times, so now I can finally do my part to help out with that.

Speaking of segues, on Sunday night our ward FHE activity was a Jell-O competition, I am holding my entry in that same picture on the left - Gelatina Colorida. It's a dessert I had frequently in Brazil, consisting of various colors of Jell-O cubed and then encased in a mixture of sweetened condensed milk, heavy cream, and unflavored gelatin. It was quite time-consuming to make and in the end I was very pleased with my dish, so naturally I felt very disappointed with the judges' decision. There were only seven entries in the contest and there were five grand prizes and mine failed to win any of them. Even a plate of lemon Jell-O with peas and string beans in it, which even its creator declared inedible, won a prize. The only other participant who didn't win a prize was Brady Emmett, and his dish didn't even have Jell-O in it (it was tapioca pudding). They did invent an honorary award for my dish ("Most Least American"), but My Gelatina Colorida losing out on the real awards was the biggest snub since The Color Purple went 0 for 11 at the 1986 Oscars.

Speaking of Brady, on Sunday night he asked me was I was going to do on Memorial Day and I said nothing, so he offered me the chance to "upgrade my holiday" (his phrase) by going geocaching with him. I had only recently heard of geocaching and I was intrigued and agreed to go. After breakfast with a group of 7 at the Northside Grill, Brady, Seth, Vaughn and I headed out to the Lower Huron Metropark to search for caches.

For those of you who haven't ever heard of it, geocaching is, according to the official website, "a treasure hunting game where you use a GPS to hide and seek containers with other participants in the activity." People hide waterproof containers in foresty-type locations, submit the GPS coordinates to geocaching.com, and then other geocachers plug those coordinates into their GPS and try to track down the box. Each box contains a log book you can sign and date, in addition to all sorts of trinkets that previous finders have left inside (I left a green origami pig named Boris in the first cache). We found four caches in the park and then headed home.

Later that evening we headed out an unofficial ward barbecue with tons of friends. It was BYO meat, so I brought a Totino's pizza to cook on the grill. Turns out that they don't taste any better when grilled. We partied like it was 1999 until it started raining, then we went home for the night.

So thanks to my cool friends I was able to take a weekend in which I had nothing planned and upgrade it to a fun weekend filled with raw oysters, free t-shirts, Jell-O snubs, geocaching, and grillin'.

I'll leave you with an image of my Gelatina Colorida, which I think would make excellent wallpaper for your desktop: